Weekly Reading Picks| Volume 15

Bob’s Weekly Reading Picks

2019.4.21 volume 15

Content

1.Your 3 Step Guide to Building a Marketing Plan That Works2.14 Steps To Grow Your Affiliate Program3.Best Open Source and Free Ecommerce Platforms for 20194.We Analyzed 12 Million Outreach Emails. Here’s What We Learned5.20 Awesome Sources of Free Data6.What’s Working in Affiliate Marketing in 2019 by STM Forum7.Amazon’s E-Commerce Adventure in China Proved Too Much of a Jungle

Creating a System for Success

The goal is to create a system that answers two questions for every new marketing channel you’re trying out:

Am I making progress?

What can I do to improve?

—Build——Measure——Learn—

Your objective remains the same: Make sales.First, you’re going to take your best shot at a specific marketing channel. Second, you’re going to measure the results. Then, based on those results you’ll make tweaks to your initial attempt and make it a little bit better.

6. Personalizing outreach email body content also seems to be an effective way to increase response rates. Emails with personalized message bodies have a 32.7% better response rate than those that don’t personalize their messages.

7. Wednesday is the “best” day to send outreach emails. Saturday is the worst. However, we didn’t find an especially large difference in response rates between different days that messages were sent.

8. Linking to social profiles in email signatures may result in better response rates. Twitter was correlated with an 8.2% increase, LinkedIn an 11.5% increase, and Instagram a 23.4% increase.

When it comes to traffic types, no candidates have been nominated for imminent extinction. But there are some that are declining and they’re mostly the older ad formats. One would be the already-mentioned POP format, followed by standard display ads (banners), which are slowly losing ground to the newer and more user-friendly Native ad formats.

Although it’s not like these will be gone anytime soon, the decline has begun. This is partially caused by regulations (such as the Better Ads Initiative from Google). Another cause is changing user habits, for example, the continuing shift from desktop to mobile formats.

Gaming: software downloads——client gaming—— app/browser gaming.Sweepstakes: carrier billing——email or CC submits. Nutra: trials—— straight saleit’s still the same vertical, just a different approach

When Amazon first entered China in 2004 with the purchase of Joyo.com, it was the largest online vendor for books, music and video there. Most Chinese consumers were using cash-on-delivery as their top form of payment.

Today, Amazon China chiefly caters to customers looking for imported international goods such as cosmetics and milk powder and is a minuscule player in the booming Chinese e-commerce market.

eBayIn 2003, eBay Inc. paid $150 million to buy EachNet, which was China’s top e-commerce site at the time. It later invested an additional $100 million. It struggled to keep up with Alibaba’s rival Taobao service, hobbled in part by a foreign management team that underestimated the competition and a payment system that was difficult for Chinese consumers to use. In 2006, eBay sold its China operations to internet company TOM Online .

WalmartWalmart Inc. also struggled to run an independent e-commerce business in China. It sold its e-commerce business to JD.com Inc. in 2016 rather than trying to crack the market on its own.

GrouponGroupon Inc. entered China in 2011 by setting by up a joint venture with Tencent Holdings Ltd. Within 18 months, it merged with another Chinese daily-deal site also backed by Tencent.

Single-brand e-commerce companies such as Zara SA, Nike Inc. and Estée Lauder Cos. have been more successful than multibrand competitors in China,